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EXTRA! Read all about it in
the W ashington Post: Torture worked;
Cheney and torture practitioners vindicated; morale at CIA harmed.

It seems coverage of the
Bush administration's "war on terror" has been put back on track by the editors
of the Washington Post and their
"sources," who appear determined to highlight the supposed successes of
waterboarding and other forms of torture.

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In the last few days the Post has markedly increased its effort
to "catapult the propaganda" (to borrow a phrase from former President George
W. Bush).When the wind is still,
Nazi propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels can be heard cheering from the grave.

Frankly, I was wondering
when this return to form would happen at the Post. I was surprised to see Post
journalists recently losing their grip, so to speak, and falling into the
practice of reporting real facts -- like the sickening revelations in the
long-suppressed CIA Inspector General's report on torture.

Apparently they have now
been reminded of the biases of the newspaper's top brass, forever justifying
the hardnosed "realism" of the Bush administration as it approved brutal and
perverse methods for stripping the "bad guys" of their clothes, their dignity,
their sense of self -- all to protect America.

Hooded, threatened with a
cocked gun and an electric drill, deprived of sleep for long periods, beaten,
kept naked or dressed in diapers, forced into painful stress positions, locked
in tiny boxes and subjected to the near-drowning of waterboarding, the
terrorism suspects were supposed to be terrorized into what the CIA
psychologists called "learned helplessness."

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And to read the Washington Post's account, it all
worked, transforming alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed from a
"truculent enemy" into what the CIA considered its "preeminent source" on
al-Qaeda.

But the story contained
some weird contradictions that might have given pause to a less credulous -- or
less biased -- newspaper. For example, the Post's
two unnamed sources who told the tale of Mohammed's transformation depicted him
as anything but a broken man suffering from "learned helplessness," terrified
of more torture. Instead, Mohammed, known as KSM, is described as holding forth
like a professor in a lecture hall, pontificating about Greek philosophy and
criticizing his American students for their shortcomings. "In one instance, he
scolded a listener for poor note-taking and his inability to recall details of
an earlier lecture," the Post wrote.

So, instead of a cowering
figure induced to talk out of fear that he might be subjected to a 184th
session of waterboarding, Mohammed appears to be a boastful narcissist who
views himself as a historic figure -- exactly the sort of interrogation subject
who would be susceptible to flattery and other successful, non-violent
strategies favored by experienced FBI interrogators.

If the "learned
helplessness" had worked -- and was the reason Mohammed was talking -- would he
really have risked scolding an American interrogator, like an angry teacher
chastising an inattentive schoolboy?

However, that is not a
question the Post asks or its editors
apparently want the readers to think much about. The story is written as if the
Post writers Peter Finn, Joby Warrick
and Julie Tate are seeking expiation for their sins of writing
fact-and-document-based stories in recent days.

The CIA is the only agency
of the U.S. government that elicits the Post's
hand-wringing concern about its morale and "spirits." It's as if CIA officers
were fragile Southern belles at risk of being overcome by "the vapors" if a
harsh word is uttered in the parlor.

It's hard to recall any similar
concern expressed by the Post over
poor morale at other government offices, say, the Environmental Protection
Agency when President George W. Bush was ignoring evidence of global warming or
the Justice Department when Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was firing
prosecutors for not going after Democrats.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army infantry/intelligence officer and then a CIA analyst for 27 years, and is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). His (more...)